When you're Alien Ant Farm, the band who resurrected Mr. Miyagi, Oompa Loompas and "Smooth Criminal," there's really only one way to deal with a horrific accident. Even when it's a crash that almost paralyzed your lead singer, knocked your favorite crewmember into a coma, killed your bus driver and nearly derailed your career.

Case in point: roughly one year to the day of the tragedy, the members of Alien Ant Farm are gathered in the Beverly Hills offices of DreamWorks Records to give a detailed account of the rainy night in Spain that could have killed them all, their rough road to recovery and their forthcoming truANT. While guitarist Terry Corso was explaining the full extent of his injuries, frontman Dryden Mitchell couldn't help but interject.

"It was just my leg, but right after it happened, there was so much pain," Corso said. "I was at a point where I couldn't even take a bath. It was just this throbbing wand of pain [and] I had a cast all the way up to my knee."

When someone mentioned the lack of skid marks in the road leading up to the wreckage, Mitchell, in a remarkably Beavis and Butt-Head-like fashion, muttered, "He said, 'Skid marks.' " And that got the whole room going.

"We all had skid marks," cracked drummer Mike Cosgrove, prompting bassist Tye Zamora to tell a straight-faced story about how he had to relieve himself in a bucket while waiting for help on the side of the road — a topic that came up again as Corso described the suddenness of the accident.

"It was the closest thing I can think of to a bomb going off by you, you know what I mean? Just sudden and the world rocking," he said.

"Are you talking about the accident," deadpanned Mitchell, "or Tye's number two?"

To paraphrase Arnold Schwarzenegger in the new "Terminator" flick, their levity is good. Clearly the guys, a friendly and talkative Southern California band whose self-released CD eventually led to a multiplatinum major-label debut, can use a few laughs.

"I kept a sense of humor about things," Mitchell said. "Which is maybe a little morbid at times, like, just cracking jokes about my neck and whatever, [but] it's good to have that."

At this point for Alien Ant Farm, it's good to have anything. A year ago, Mitchell was on his back with a broken neck. Their bus driver's body was under a sheet on the side of the road. A valued friend and crewmember, his face a bloodied mess, would eventually fall into a coma.